Principal Lead Solution Architect - Customer

Principal Lead Solution Architect (Customer)
Location: Remote (UK)
Permanent
RS Group is seeking a Principal Lead Solution Architect to join our team. In this senior leadership role, you will shape technology strategy and solution design across our global e-commerce platforms. You’ll combine hands-on architecture, governance, and people management to ensure RS continues to scale, innovate, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

You’ll work across programmes in Digital Commerce, Customer Data, and Value-Added Services, designing solutions that power our next-generation e-commerce and B2B customer platforms.

What You’ll Be Doing

Programme & Project Leadership

• Lead the architecture of RS’s global e-commerce platforms and supporting systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and an exceptional customer experience.
• Shape the design of Value-Added Services, including eProcurement and B2B quotation tools.
• Drive initiatives that integrate customer platforms, data, and services into a seamless digital ecosystem.
• Ensure architecture alignment and clear communication across business and technology teams.
• Champion technical excellence and promote the “art of the possible.”
  
  

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Solution Architects.
• Support professional growth, wellbeing, and a high-performing team culture.
• Build strong partnerships with internal stakeholders, engineering teams, and leading technology providers.
  
  

Architecture Governance & Decision-Making

• Chair architecture review meetings, approving solution design documents and key decisions.
• Present cross-cutting architectural issues to the Group Architecture Board and engage senior leaders in decision-making.
• Maintain consistent architectural standards, patterns, and principles across domains.
  
  

Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders across the portfolio.
• Represent technology and architecture at programme boards and governance forums.
• Translate complex technical decisions into clear business impact for executive stakeholders.
• Maintain a holistic view of company-wide technology roadmaps.

About You

You are a strategic, hands-on technology leader with a passion for delivering innovative, scalable, and robust solutions. You thrive in complex environments, can influence at all levels, and have a proven track record of building high-performing architecture teams.

What You’ll Need

• Proven experience as a Lead Solution Architect in a global or large-scale enterprise.
• Deep expertise in enterprise architecture patterns: microservices, APIs, event-driven, cloud-native.
• Hands-on knowledge of modern platforms and technologies such as:
• Cloud: AWS, Azure
• Customer platforms: Adobe Commerce, Informatica
• Web & Mobile: Node.js, React, responsive design
• Integration: MuleSoft, Apollo GraphQL, Kong
• Strong background in e-commerce and B2B platforms, with exposure to ERP, CRM, Product, Data, and Supply Chain systems.
• Knowledge of security, scalability, maintainability, usability, monitoring, and alerting.
• Expertise in architecture design, including methodologies, diagrams, analysis, and specifications.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence at executive level.
• Leadership experience in mentoring, line management, and building high-performing architecture teams.
  
  

The extras you’ll get:

At RS, as well as the usual employee benefits you’d expect from a FTSE listed company, including annual performance bonus, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, private healthcare, in the UK&I, we’ve just introduced a number of new Family Friendly Policies including:​

• Help for people to take control of ongoing Health conditions such as diabetes or asthma with £500 a year available for monitoring & consultation​
• Support for Neurodiverse colleagues and families with neurodiverse members with needs assessment, diagnosis and post diagnostic support for autism spectrum, ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome​
• Support for Women at different life stages from streamlined fertility support through to diagnosis and monitoring of both endometriosis and menopause​
•  Helping our LGBTQ+ community through enhanced coverage for trans colleagues, including voice coaching, facial surgery, and gender confirmation surgery​
• Additions to Fertility coverage including IVF for lesbian couples and information/support around surrogacy and adoption for all. 

We are RS

At RS we’ve been solving engineering problems for over 80 years: big ones, small ones, easy and difficult ones. We turn the ‘what ifs’ into the ‘why nots’, the impossible into the possible.  ​

Our purpose? Making amazing happen for a better world.  ​

We offer service and product solutions. We send out a parcel every 2 seconds, to over 130 countries. We provide over 700,000 in-stock and over 3 million unstocked products to more than 1.2 million customers.  ​

We want people like you, as you are curious about things, you like doing things differently and also in a human way with empathy. Because that’s exactly how we partner with people – our customers, suppliers, colleagues and communities – to solve problems.  ​

We’ll also invest in your development and wellbeing – because building a more diverse and inclusive culture, being ethical, responsible, and committed to our Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) action plan is at the heart of everything we do. ​

Come and join us and we’ll help you to think big, do more and unleash your brilliance, so you do amazing things too.​

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